Tim Austin

Work in tech, innovation and business. Enjoy travel, food, wine, nature, art and sport. Opinions my own.

[Tim Austin @tja]

Drones have very quickly become one of the most impactful technologies. Micro drones are amazing.

[Alex Toussaint @alextoussss]

Extremely excited to announce our first air-to-air kill of a flying moth by an autonomous micro-drone. This is a big step towards completely eradicating mosquitoes.

[Tim Austin @tja]

This is the most American thing I have seen ever. Happy 250th America.

[Gun Drummer @Gundrummer69]

These re-enactments are getting out of hand… #4thofjuly #independenceday

[Tim Austin @tja]

Easily my favourite banjo player.

[Winston Marshall @MrWinMarshall]

The TRUTH About The Banjo | America's 250th Special

[Tim Austin @tja]

Not entirely convinced this will work yet but it’s looking promising for robotic home help.

[Weave Robotics @weaverobotics]

Today, we’re launching our home robot Isaac 1.

Isaac 1 deliveries will begin this fall.

Order yours below.

[Tim Austin @tja]

Looks amazing: Lego Sagrada Família church, the Gaudi designed church.

[Tim Austin @tja]

I love this capability from Starlink: connecting schools that would never have had reliable internet before.

[Starlink @Starlink]

Starlink is connecting more than 1,000 people including students and teachers across 14 schools in Bolivia to reliable high-speed internet, enabling them to build digital skills and improve literacy levels 🛰️♥️

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

In a workshop on the outskirts of Bletchley (it had to be there, didn't it), on the 26th of March this year, a small British company called Pulsar Fusion did something that has not been done by any other company or government on Earth.

It ignited a controlled plasma inside the test chamber of a working nuclear fusion rocket engine.

The plasma held, along with the chamber. The fusion reaction was the kind of reaction that, contained inside a sufficiently engineered magnetic bottle, will one day take a crewed British vehicle to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months, and that will, within the working lifetime of the engineers presently building it, make the outer planets of the solar system accessible to anyone with a British passport.

The geography of the achievement deserves a longer moment of pause. Bletchley, in 1942, was where Alan Turing and his colleagues broke the Enigma cipher and almost certainly shortened the war in Europe by two years. Pulsar Fusion's headquarters sits roughly 600 yards from the Hut where they did it.

The country that did the maths inside that hut has just, less than a mile down the road, ignited the plasma that could power the next century of human space travel. There is a continuity of British scientific lineage here that is, on the face of it, almost embarrassingly providential, and it is almost completely unreported in the British press.

It's not quite Kitty-Hawk-to-the-moon in 61 years, but it's close.

Like so many great companies of profound importance, Pulsar Fusion is pretty small. It was founded in 2013, and employs around 50 staff. Its chief executive, Richard Dinan, is a working British physicist who has spent the last decade quietly assembling the team and the capital to do what the world's national space agencies have been promising for 60 years and consistently failing to deliver.

The competing American programmes, principally at NASA's Glenn Research Center and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, are years behind on the propulsion side. The competing Chinese programmes are obscure but, on what is known publicly, also behind. The European Space Agency is, as ever, organising a workshop. Pulsar fired its plasma in March and has been preparing the next-stage tests in the months since.
What this kind of capability means, when commercialised, is genuinely vast.

The economic argument for getting a payload to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months is not principally about the human passengers, though there is one. It is about cargo. Given a 30-day transit, Mars becomes a logistically tractable destination for the kind of infrastructure-build that turns it from a flag-planting science mission into a working industrial site.

The argument for the outer planets is even larger. The asteroid belt alone, on conservative mineralogical estimates, contains more economically viable platinum-group metals than the entire crust of the Earth has been mined for in industrial history. The first country with reliable fusion propulsion is the first country with reliable access to that supply. The country that holds that capacity, fifty years from now, will be holding the most consequential industrial advantage of the 21st century, and there is no obvious second prize.

The standard British response to this kind of thing is to either ignore it entirely, sell the company to an American buyer at series B (the DeepMind path) for fire-sale prices, or fund it at the level of a Whitehall departmental tea and coffee budget (the Skycutter and Orbex paths).

The standard British response will not be sufficient. Pulsar Fusion needs the kind of patient capital that turns a working demonstration into an operational engine, and that, in turn, into a manufacturing capability. The British state, on present form, is structurally incapable of providing it, British pension funds are structurally incapable of investing in it, and the British political class will, on present form, only notice if it somehow manages to swing a leadership election.

I wantt= Pulsar Fusion treated as a national-strategic asset, and beyond that as a potential subject of national destiny.

The Sovereign AI Fund that backed Ineffable Intelligence has a clear template. The Prosperity Zone programme we designed at Progress that anchors heavy industry at SaxaVord and Teesside has the geographic flexibility to include a fusion-propulsion cluster in Buckinghamshire, six miles from the most evocative site in modern British scientific history.

The procurement architecture of every major British defence and space agency should, from this autumn, be writing offtake contracts contingent on Pulsar's milestones. There's nothing extreme about these ideas. We could have been doing it decades ago.

I always conceived of Britain as being as much among the stars as it is on Earth. To buy into the idea of Britain as a culture and polity is necessarily to buy into the concept of the human being as an illimitable force. Our history is littered with happy instances of people of great fortitude hitting upon obstacles and, with a cry of "This will not stop us", clearing the way for our brothers and sisters to follow through.

A small British company in Bletchley has, while nobody was looking, extended that arm of our tradition, by accomplishing one of the most important pieces of scientific engineering of the decade.

The country that produced them is, in a measurable sense, the same country that produced the Bombe, the Colossus, the jet engine, the structure of DNA, and the World Wide Web. The capacity is intact. The political class capable of recognising it must catch up, and will.

[Terence McCarthy @TerenceMcCart14]

Melbourne…shrouded in fog!

[Tim Austin @tja]

@DavidSacks @theallinpod @Jason @chamath @friedberg Love the @theallinpod well deserved audience numbers.

[Tim Austin @tja]

Always great to hear @chamath on business and AI.

[8090 @8090_Factory]

Chamath's full talk at Stanford ↓
https://t.co/homyQN1TSR

[Ben Cooper @LaunchPhoto]

25 years ago today I photographed my first launch. This morning I shot my 595th. What a journey.

They're all here: https://t.co/1uiQiG1gAz

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

Japanese engineers developed a “Sword Tip Visualization System” for the Fencing World Championships, and it makes fencing look absolutely incredible to watch.

[DaVinci @BiancoDavinci]

The oldest working astronomical clock installed in 1410, Prague.

[Chief Nerd @TheChiefNerd]

Jason Says the Auto-Translate Feature on X is the ‘Most Impressive Tech Feature Released in Years’

“Elon and the X team should get a Nobel Peace Prize award for this.”

[Tim Austin @tja]

Surely this is what AI was meant for.

[Tim Austin @tja]

Great website for visualising Australia’s fuel reserves.

[FuelAustralia.org @FuelAustralia]

My live tracking confirms the diesel problem in real time.

I'm independently monitoring 28 inbound fuel tankers from 9 open sources (port schedules, AIS satellite, fixture reports). The numbers:

Diesel burns at ~92 ML/day. Petrol at 44. Jet at 25. Same diesel-skew you've identified — and it shows up starkly in the forward projection.

With verified-only supply, diesel exhaustion is projected ~16 May. Petrol? Beyond 90 days. The diesel gap is the crisis.

I've built a live model showing exactly this at https://t.co/1ADWK9N9dV — toggle between "Verified" and "Est. Flow" to see the range of outcomes.

Also a tool to look at some solutions... Would be interested in your take on the structural storage gap. Australia's 25-day reserve has been the norm for years — the crisis just exposed what was always there.

Agree with your EV point. Mining, agriculture, trucking, and defence can't electrify overnight. 33,500 ML/year of diesel demand doesn't disappear with passenger EVs — you need green ammonia for shipping, e-fuels for aviation, and battery-electric haul trucks for mining (see the long-term vision page). https://t.co/vVfwlCcLo2

[Tim Austin @tja]

@Jason @friedberg @DavidSacks Fantastic team, can’t wait to see what they achieve.

[Tim Austin @tja]

Amazing architecture of La Sagrada Família, on the bucket list to visit.

[La Sagrada Família @sagradafamilia]

The cross and the lower terminal of the tower of Jesus Christ are now completely visible. ✨

[Tolkien Universe @tolkienzone]

Some biologists have discovered this strange tree in New Zealand. According to experts, it is heading to Isengard to destroy Saruman.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

Watch it here: https://t.co/RxeQKH21KM